Update – Paladin Preview scheduled for April 14 in the US as well, it means we will most likely see it live early tomorrow in the US.
Paladin Preview is Coming
Instead it will be posted Wednesday, April 14!
Blue posts
If you've spent much time on this forum in the last several months, you'd have noticed a common theme is that tanks start to have threat problems again at extreme levels of gear. The problem really isn't that surprising. Say that tanks start out doing half the damage of DPS specs. All is well. But the DPS specs continue to improve their DPS stats while tanks continue to improve their survival stats. Even if tanks spend a little effort on threat stats (some of which they get naturally on their gear), they still can't keep up with the DPS specs. It's a gear scaling problem.
We considered, and rejected, many other solutions to the problem, such as increasing threat modifier or choosing to no longer make tanking gear. Ultimately we decided that there were good things about the way rage works on warriors and bears (translating incoming damage into threat) and the way the mage talent, Incanter's Absorption turned damage taken into damage done. It just provides the damage increase in a way that's controllable.
Vengeance is NOT there so that you no longer have to ever worry about threat. It's fine with us if you have to consider threat a little bit at the start of a fight. Again, if we wanted to make threat not a factor in WoW, we'd just remove it and have mobs always stick to you rather than just cranking the threat numbers up so high that you don't have to take it very seriously.
Vengeance is also not designed to keep tank dps high no matter what in any circumstances. It's designed so that when you're being hit, your damage stays elevated. The damage done scales with your health, essentially allowing tank DPS to increase as DPS specs DPS increases. It scales a little bit with damage being taken too so that you don't turn into a juggernaut if a rogue sticks you with a dagger in PvP. (Source)
Paladin (Forums / Talent Calculator)
Paladin Class Preview
I'm warning you now that we still have a lot of work to do on the paladin talent trees. The preview will have the new spells and passive talent tree bonuses, but we can't provide many details yet on specific talent changes. We can discuss general goals, but not many of those should come as a huge surprise to regular forum readers.
As I've said recently, we didn't go with paladins last because we were saving the best for last or because we want to punish them or because we were at a loss for what to do. We just like to focus on one class at a time, and someone was going to be the last one. It's random. (Source)
Healing and Mana management
The focus seems to be more on conserving mana, and not overhealing. Yeah. Paladins don't do that.
They don't today. They will in Cataclysm.
The design of "I never run out of mana, but I am very limited in the roles I can fill" isn't a really awesome one. (Source)
Warrior (Forums / Talent Calculator)
Heroic Leap
The challenge with previews is to provide enough context so players understand the goals of the abilities without providing so much detail that players get over-focused on the minutiae.
Imagine Heroic Leap can be used in any stance, in or out of combat, hits for very serious AE damage and applies the Thunder Clap debuff. We keep it under control with a 2-3 min cooldown. This means warriors will sometimes be zipping in and out of melee, but that's kind of the warrior thing, and again the cooldown can help balance it.
I don't think these concerns are hard to address. We screwed up in the preview, I think, by making it sound like Heroic Leap was supposed to be a replacement for a Charge / Tclap macro. That wasn't the intention. (Source)
